Wednesday, August 24, 2016

I've been working on a project recently which required testing on a mobile device. The project started in April this year and was focused solely on iOS.

When I looked into what was available for mobile testing I found a number of different tools:

KIF

Appium

Frank

Calabash

EarlGray

UI Automation

What I found next was a bother. I need a tool which would be used for testing the IPA we would ship from an app store. Tools like Frank and Calabash are great at automating tests but they required you to build a special version of the app. This would not be the same app you deployed to an app store.

This made it easy to eliminate those two great tools from my list of potential test automation tools.

I then looked into KIF and EarlGray. They had great reviews and looked really promising until I noticed Apple made significant changes to the UI Automation framework and broke KIF and EarlGray. So if I wanted to test against iOS 9.3 developed with XCode 7 and Swift I was probably not going to want to use KIF or EarlGray.

So the obvious choice was Appium. However, even Appium seem to be affected by the changes Apple announced at the July 2015 Developer Conference. :(

Since our iterations were one week and waiting to see who would 'fix' issues with their framework wasn't really an option, we branched Frank and started developing the app using Frank for UI testing. In the meantime we looked at UI Automation (our app was iOS only, so we didn't need to worry about Android support).

Initial use of UI Automation seemed good. So we started automating UI tests with it but continued to keep the Frank tests running in parallel. However after a few iterations we started to see maintaining the UI Automation tests was becoming increasingly difficult. Since I got into UI automation in 1998 I have found that failure to maintain a test automation framework is one of the common reasons for UI automation to fail. We didn't have a team of 20 QA Automation experts to keep the UI Automation framework going. :(

So I had a second look at the previously discarded frameworks. To my surprise and delight I found that support for them had been re-established and I took a second look at using Appium.

Appium is definitely not fast and I'm looking for ways I can reduce the execution time of the Appium test suite (currently 15 minutes when run on hardware; I'd like to get it down to 5 minutes plus add more tests; maybe run tests in parallel on four or more phones).

Bottom line, Appium seems to be working well for us. I've created a page object model framework. In my next article I'll talk about using the Appium Inspector on a Mac laptop and things I found blocked me or slowed me down.

Recently, someone on the WebDriver Google Group asked what the difference between NotFoundException, NoSuchElementException and StateElementReferenceException are. Here is the answer I posted:

The NotFoundException is a super class which includes the subclass NoSuchElementException. The known direct subclasses of NotFoundException are: NoAlertPresentException, NoSuchContextException, NoSuchElementException, NoSuchFrameException and NoSuchWindowException. So if I want one catch statement to catch all five exception and they will all be handled the same way then I can just handle NotFoundException. But if I want to handle any of these five exceptions differently, I can catch the more specific subclass.

The NoSuchElementException is thrown when the element you are attempting to find is not in the DOM. This can happen for three reasons.

The first is because the element does not exist and never will. To fix this, change your findElement to be correct.

The second is that you need to do something on the page to make the element appear. For example, the user selects Country and javascript populates a City field. If you attempt to look for a city before you select a country, the city you are looking for does not exist and you get a NoSuchElementException. To fix this you have to make sure the steps in your test are correct.

The third is that the element is generated by javascript but WebDriver attempts to find the element before the javascript has created it. The fix for this is to use WebDriverWait to wait for the element to appear (visibility and/or clickable).

StaleElementReferenceException is when you find an element, the DOM gets modified then you reference the WebElement. For example,

WebElement we = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#valid"));

// you do something which alters the page or a javascript event alters the page

we.click();

A classic example if this might be:

List<WebElement> listOfAnchors = driver.findElements(By.tag("a"));

for(WebElement anchor : listOfAnchors) {

anchor.click();

System.out.println(driver.getTitle());

driver.navigate.back();

}

This code will get all the anchor elements into a list. Lets say there are 5 anchors on the page. The list now has 5 WebElement references. We get the first reference and click it. This take us to a new page. This is a new DOM. We print the title of the new page. Then we use back() to go back to the original page. The DOM looks just like the same DOM but it is a different DOM. So now all the references in the list a stale. On the second iteration, it gets the second reference and clicks it. This will throw a StaleElementReferenceException.

More difficult to debug is:

WebElement we = driver.findElement(...);

// javascript event gets fired by the website

we.click();

Sometimes this will throw a StaleElementReferenceException but sometimes the timing will be different and the click will work. I've seen many people have this intermittent problem. They add more code which doesn't fix the problem. The extra code just changes the timing and hides the problem. The problem comes back a few days later. So they add more random code. It looks like they fixed the problem but they just changed the timing. So if you get a StaleElementReferenceException and it is not clear why, it is probably this problem and you need to figure out how to make the findElement and click atomic.

Normally I would expect this to work. However, the text() function does not seem to find it. Peter Jeffery Gale (thanks Peter) noticed that the following locator did work:

"//a[contains(.,'partial link text')]"

The . notation is the current node in the DOM. This is going to be an object of type Node. I'm guessing that the Node is getting cast to a string. Something similar to:

"//a[contains(string(.),'partial link text')]"

The end result seems to be that getting the entire Node, convert it to a string and scanning the string for a substring always works. Using the XPath function text() to get the text for an element only gets the text up to the first inner element. If the text you are looking for is after the inner element you must use the current node to search for the string and not the XPath text() function.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

While setting up a test environment today we decided to have the tests running on the same machine as the build radiator.

A build radiator takes up the entire display. It shows a green bar for each job on the build server. If someone checks in a change and it breaks a test, the bar turns red and everyone stops to fix the build.

The consequence of this is that the build radiator has to be visible to everyone in the room. Having a browser open on the display is not an option.

So we need to run our WebDriver tests without showing the browser or any other output. Our build server is running Linux. So we have WebDriver tests. We can run them from the command line using something like:

java org.testng.TestNG testng.xml

where testng.xml is a TestNG test suite example. When we run it as this we see the browser open and the tests executing. The tests were written using ChromeDriver. When we run this on the build radiator however, we don't want the browser opening. The solution is actually quite easy for Linux. We use an application called Xvfb:

The command xvfb-run will run the application using the X Virtual FrameBuffer. The --server-args lets us pass arguments to the server. The "-screen 0" tells xvfb to use screen 0. The "1600x1200x24" tells xvfb to make the virtual display 1600 by 1200 with 24 bit depth. If your application has to work on 1024 by 768 and 16 bit colour then you can use "1024x768x16".

When you execute this you will not see the browser open. It almost seems like nothing is happening. The only thing you will see is the output from TestNG (a dot for a pass, an I for an ignore and an F for a failure) and the output from chromedriver. What if you want to look at the logs and see just the output from TestNG; not interlaced with output from chromedriver?

This requires a few changes to the creation of the WebDriver object. Normally, you might have something like:

This will stop most the output but you will see the header for when chromedriver starts up:

Starting ChromeDriver (v2.9.248307) on port 9515

So how do you get rid of this? I was digging through the code for chromedriver (remember it is open source) and I found some code where it was checking for the property webdriver.chrome.silentOutput. If this was set to true then it would run with the silent flag set to true. So I tried:

Saturday, July 12, 2014

I was recently poking around on my Terminal (Mac OS X) and I noticed one of the environment variables was:

DIRSTACK=()

So I checked the man page for the bash shell to see what I could find about it:

man bash

Reading the man page I find DIRSTACK is an array relating to popd, pushd and dirs. Rather than using cd to change to a directory I can use pushd. For example:

pushd ~/Downloads

This will change directory to ~/Downloads plus it will add the directory to the DIRSTACK array. I can add some more to the DIRSTACK using:

pushd ~/Documentspushd /Volumes

Now if I issue a dirs I will see:

/Volumes ~/Documents ~/Downloads

If you search for popd, pushd and dirs on the bash man page you will find all the settings for these builtin commands:

dirs [-clpv] [+n] [-n]

+n display the nth entry from the left, e.g. +2 will display the entry in position 2, this is zero-indexed
-n displays the nth entry from the right, just like the +n this is zero-indexed, e.g. -0 is the first entry
-c clears the DIRSTACK
-l displays a longer list, e.g. ~ gets expanded to the full directory name /Users/darrell
-p display one entry per line
-v display one entry per line with a number at the start of each line

You might thing the -v option is just line numbers but they are more than that. The numbers are directly related to the -n and +n option. Additionally, I can refer to specific entries in the list using ~n. For example, if the dirs -v displays:

0 ~/Public 1 ~/Downloads 2 ~/Documents 3 ~

then ls -l ~2 will be the same as ls -l ~/Documents. I can also use the tilde notation for popping elements off the stack as well. The next command, popd, has the following format:

popd [-n] [+n] [-n]

-n is literally -n, when you normally popd it will change to the directory you pop, -n will suppress this

+n removes n entries from the left, e.g. +2 will remove from third element from left (zero-indexed)

-n removes n entries from the right, e.g. -1 will pick the second element from right

The pushd commands looks similar:

pushd [-n] [dir]pushd [-n] [+n] [-n]

-n is literally -n, and like popd it adds to the stack but does not cd to the new directory.

[dir] will push [dir] on the DIRSTACK then cd [dir]

+n will rotate the stack so the nth directory from the left is at the top

-n will roate the stack so the nth directory from the right is at the top

Friday, July 11, 2014

My current project uses Ruby and has a web testing component to it. The obvious choice for testing a web application with Ruby would be Selenium-WebDriver.

If you are familiar with Ruby you should be familiar with the Interactive Ruby Shell or irb.

If I enter irb at a command prompt I am placed at the Interactive Ruby Shell:

1.9.3-p547 :001 >

Once you are at the Interactive Ruby Shell you can try things to see how they work. In a compiled language like Java you would have to compile the code into class files then execute them. With Ruby you can actually type the lines out and see what happens immediately. For example, to do the basic Selenium example I can enter:

require 'selenium-webdriver'driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome

At this point a chrome browser should open. If it does not possible problems might be if chromedriver isn't in your PATH. Before you open the command prompt make sure that chromedriver is in your PATH. If it is in the PATH and you run irb then the Ruby code above should open a Chrome browser. It also assumes you have Chrome installed.

Once the browser opens you can do:

driver.methods - Object.methods

All objects in Ruby have a methods method. All objects also inherit Object. So the line above says to give me all the methods for driver and subtract all the Object methods from the list. So what will remain are the Selenium WebDriver methods:

Friday, June 20, 2014

Talking to one of my colleagues today. He asked me about testing desktop applications. As someone who predates the Internet, testing desktop applications was not foreign to me. However I realized that many testers today have only worked on web or mobile device applications.

The first site has a wide range of links and it currently actively maintained. Unfortunately, it has more links for web and mobile testing but there are some desktop application tools listed.

The second link is to sourceforge. It will take you to the recently updated testing links. It includes open source applications for all sorts of testing. You can remove the "recently-updated" filter and see more but I usually restrict myself to recently updated tools.

If the tool is for desktop testing and it has not been recently updated, there is a strong chance it does not work with modern applications or a current operating system. The older the tool the higher the risk it will not work on Windows 7 or 8, Mac OS X 10.8 or 10.9.

If you enter in a search term, like "testing" then a whole set of menus will appear below the search term and you can narrow things down even further. For example, after entering "testing" into the search text box I can select OS to be "Mac" and category "Quality Assurance".

I can also clear all the filters and search for things which might help narrow it down in different ways. For example, if I know how to program Java and I think I might want to add to the open source tool then I can filter for things with Programming Language "Java". Additionally, if the desktop application is written using Swing and Java I could search for Programming Language "Java", Category "Testing" then enter "swing". From the results I find jrobot (http://jayrobot.sourceforge.net/) and gtt (GUI Test Tool; http://gtt.sourceforge.net/).

It is also worth just poking around sourceforge and keeping a mental note about things you find. This is because you'll be surprised what you stumble. For example, JFCUnit is a good tool for testing Java Swing applications but it didn't come with JFCUnit (http://jfcunit.sourceforge.net/).